Case Study – Mill Valley Refuse Service, Inc.

Saved 14% in collection routing efficiency, reduced operating costs by $375,000, and resulted in a reduction in the number of vehicles from 22 to 19.

FleetRoute route optimization software was used to reroute the 48,000 collection stops serviced by Mill Valley Refuse Service, Inc. (MVRS) in Marin County, California. MVRS is contracted to collect refuse, recyclable materials and yard waste from eight municipalities on a weekly basis. The area is challenging to collect because of the suburban mountainous terrain with street size restrictions. This requires small, medium and large trucks where the small trucks dump into the large ones several times per day. The trucks have both one- and two-person crews. The collection service levels and set-outs vary and include residential and commercial, curbside and backyard pickups. The routes contain many corner lots and uphill/downhill stops. There were many customers whose service addresses are not the same as their house addresses due to the hilly terrain. This required the development of easy data editing capabilities to override standard address matching techniques.

This rerouting was done as a service bureau project, managed by the lead developer of FleetRoute, Dr. Paul Patterson. MVRS bought the FleetRoute license and makes modifications to the original routes. The resulting routes saved 14 percent in efficiency, reduced operating costs by $375,000, and resulted in a reduction in the number of vehicles from 22 to 19. This avoided a rate increase to the municipalities.

“MVRS had some unique problems. In each instance, the FleetRoute technology and its implementation assistance resolved the issues in a timely manner. The results speak for themselves.”

We chose FleetRoute's service bureau to develop our routes using GIS route optimization software because this approach provided a more economic, sophisticated, and faster solution than we could develop in-house. The service bureau gave us valuable access to the FleetRoute team's extensive experience in waste collection and advanced route design. Using the service bureau allowed us not to worry about the methodology, but rather to focus on the most beneficial routing for the City of Edmond.

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